Last night's set list

At The Duke of Wellington, Newcastle: -

Mind Your Own Business
Things We Said Today

After much refreshment and a thoroughly miserable 2nd half at the match.

Larkin's Jazz

All that jazz
Philip Larkin loved trad jazz. John Harris grew up thinking nothing before bebop was worth listening to. So he tried to discover the appeal of Ellington and Basie

John Harris
The Guardian
Saturday 21 May 2011

I can live a week without poetry," Philip Larkin said in 1965, "but not a day without jazz."

Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke: these were people all but idolised by Larkin. To some members of his generation, he later reflected, what they played "had the same emotional effect as perhaps 100 years ago the great poets had". In his case, the magic lingered on: if you want an image of the poet at his happiest, picture him with an early-evening gin and tonic, and trumpets and saxophones blaring from his record player.

Jazz, then, should be central to our understanding of who Larkin was, a fascinating influence on someone whose attachment to the music of black America can still seem unlikely. But make no mistake: he not only loved jazz, but was fantastically knowledgeable about it, as proved by his writing on the subject, mostly published in the Daily Telegraph and later anthologised in the collection All What Jazz. For the most part, his reviews were elegant, forensic and passionate, qualities that defined his opinions on both the music that he treasured, and the stuff he loathed.

He thought all in jazz had been well until the early 1940s. The music that had first emerged from such cities as New Orleans, Chicago and St Louis had become more exploratory and virtuosic, but retained its essential qualities – infectious rhythm, an accent on melody and an all-pervading sense of joy. But thereafter, the musicians who invented the free-flowing, transcendent music known as bebop had taken jazz into – as he saw it – a deeply ill-advised place, thanks to their embrace of two wider currents: the drive for African-American empowerment, and the iconoclasm and experimentation that Larkin also recognised in art, and maligned as "modernism". His vicious critique of all this is laid out in his infamous introduction to All What Jazz, written in 1968, a lengthy assault on "a quality of irresponsibility peculiar to this century".

The division between "traditional" and "modern" jazz is a crude distinction, which ignores the fact that all jazz was essentially modern in its impulses, and that one approach grew out of the other. But Larkin's tastes were defined by it. In his estimation, such musicians as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk had begun the rot – and by the time such revered players as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman arrived, he had angrily tuned out.

I came of age in a culture in which the jazz both categorised and demonised as "trad" would not do at all. I have childhood memories that fit the picture – of impatiently flicking through the three TV channels, and alighting on ensembles of men in candy-striped waistcoats, blowing out a racket that seemed dated, even flatly silly. To hear any trad jazz standard was to be reminded of things both remote and irrelevant – flickering cinema screens, flappers dancing the Charleston, hair slicked back with brilliantine – signifiers of a world more distant even than that of the second world war.

Bebop and what had followed cemented a definition of cool that still seemed exciting beyond words: sharp clothes, French cigarettes, dangerous drug habits. I had Larkin's prejudices in complete reverse: my friends and I were passionate about both rock music and jazz, but anything before 1945 was anathema.

Most of that is, of course, a travesty. It confuses the washed-out approximation of early jazz offered by British revivalists with the genuine article – as if, say, Sidney Bechet and Acker Bilk were interchangeable. It pays no heed to that essential aspect of grown-up listening whereby one should often downplay the demands of the immediate moment, and try to understand the importance of context: what the music said in its time, what conventions it overturned, the effect that it had on its first listeners.

With a copy of All What Jazz in one hand and a stiff drink in the other, it was time to avenge all that, and somehow move on. "For the generations that came to adolescence between the wars," Larkin wrote, "jazz was that unique private excitement that youth seems to demand." The question was simple: was it possible to divine that same quality at several decades' distance?

In 2010, the Proper record label released a 4 CD-set titled Larkin's Jazz: 81 pieces of music, packaged in a box featuring an affectionate portrait of Larkin by Gerald Scarfe, and put together by Trevor Tolley and John White, the latter a former friend and colleague from the University of Hull. As a guide to Larkin's tastes, it's beyond criticism. As an extensive primer in the music's first few decades, it is almost as superlative – a portrait of jazz developing at speed, and gradually acquiring the confidence that so spectacularly flowered in the 1930s, with the decisive advent of the big bands, authors of the first music to evoke the dazzle and noise of the modern city.

At first, the music can be so frantic as to seem almost insane (listen, for example, to the Washboard Rhythm Kings' crazed "I'm Gonna Play Down by the Ohio", recorded in New Jersey in 1932, which seems to move at 3,000 miles per hour), which can perhaps be traced to a collective amazement that the musicians are not just being allowed to play it, but positively encouraged – and a corresponding suspicion that, at any second, the licence may be revoked. But when they acquire enough self-assurance to cool down and swing – as in the work of Duke Ellington and Count Basie – the musicians soar, and transcend both their era and any sense of being bound by generic constraints.

Over three weeks, I listened to Larkin's Jazz on the train, in the car, at home and in hotels. And as the music played and I scribbled down notes, I forgot about most of the technological limitations, dropped my guard, and found myself drawn in. Age had evidently opened my mind: not entirely surprisingly, even when it came to the music so beloved of the British revivalists, there were qualities I had never thought to divine. An abundance of the "happy, cake-walky syncopation that set feet walking and shoulders jerking" was obvious from the start. The best playing was indeed "relaxed and expansive". It is not one of his most elegant tributes, but the pieces here were endlessly "full of tunes you could whistle".

In defiance not only of the predicament of black America, but the grim events of inter-war history, just about every note on the four discs is suffused with a sense of hard-won happiness, which says a lot about why Larkin loved this music, and its relation to his own melancholia. The blues informed and often defined pre-war jazz, but even when its themes were introspective and sad – the titles on Larkin's Jazz include "I'm Down in the Dumps", "Nobody's Sweetheart" and "That's the Blues, Old Man" – they were usually delivered with a devil-may-care fatalism, so as to come out sounding life-affirming. Most of what he listened to was mood-lifting, which was presumably the whole point. In 1942, he wrote a letter to Kingsley Amis, while listening to Louis Armstrong's "Dear Old Southland", a characteristically ebullient piece in which the brass, piano and charging tempo conspire to evoke a mad night on the tiles. "To me the present is utterly repellent," he wrote, as Armstrong and his accomplices flew on. "I frequently want to lie down and vomit." If that were true, it was often jazz that allowed him a contrasting glimpse of joy – and therefore his own kind of equilibrium.

As the music on Larkin's Jazz played, much bigger themes came to mind. While listening to, say, "The Blues Jumped a Rabbit" by Jimmie Noone and his New Orleans Band, in which the languid atmosphere of Noone's home city is evoked beautifully and a piano player named Gideon Honore plays with amazing subtlety, a thought occurred to me, not for the first time: what a fascinating jumble of influences lay behind this music, and what incredible stories it continues to tell – among other things, of slavery and segregation.

Breathtaking paradigm shifts arrived. In the sax-playing of Coleman Hawkins, for example, one hears the opening-up of the ethereal, unbounded voice that would so dominate the world after bebop. And, inevitably, there were plenty of moments that defied analysis, and simply delivered an inexplicable rush. Of a Sidney Bechet piece released in 1940, Larkin once wrote (to his schoolfriend Jim Sutton): "I rushed out on Monday and brought 'Nobody Knows The Way I Feel This Morning'. Fucking, cunting, bloody good! Bechet is a great artist. As soon as he starts playing, you automatically stop thinking about anything else and listen. Power and glory!" I now know what he means: in wartime Britain, this piece must have sounded like news from another world.

All that said, there are some sounds to which certain people will always be allergic. Aficionados will doubtless balk at this but, to my ears, there is something about the sound of a clarinet parping away while a trumpet hyperactively does much the same that will always seem so free of depth and pathos as to come out sounding trite. The same applies to scat singing: in such songs as "Squeeze Me", when it is done by Larkin's beloved Louis Armstrong, it's hard not to shake off the sense of an era when black musicians always felt the need to send the music up, and thereby sold themselves short. With his customary tact when it came to questions of race relations, Larkin identified one of jazz's watershed points as the moment when "the Negro stopped wanting to entertain the white man", which may say something about what can irk people about this music: the whiff of yes-sirree minstrelism, and music that eventually acquired real depth being sidetracked into camp, made all the more irritating by where it sits in relation to the colour bar.

And yet, and yet. At certain points, the music collected on Larkin's Jazz flies so high as to make the musicians, in glorious defiance of their time, sound like some of the most liberated people who have ever walked the earth – as happens with Count Basie and Duke Ellington. There are five pieces by the former's orchestra, recorded between 1936 and 1938: "One O' Clock Jump", "Sent for You Yesterday", "Every Tub", "Swingin' the Blues" and "Jumpin' at the Woodside" (plus "Shoe-Shine Boy" by Jones-Smith Incorporated, of which Basie was a member). On all of them, you hear a kind of jazz no longer in thrall to the Dixieland model of a whimsical mini-riot, but newly relaxed, and virtuosic.

Larkin wrote about this music with a fascinating mixture of measured analysis and poetic appreciation, as in his review of the album that took its title from that last piece: "I have never heard a band whoop in the last ride-out as this one, and how striking the accompaniments are – the menacing trombone figure behind [Buck] Clayton [trumpet], the harsh, falling single note behind [Lester] Young [saxophone] repeated like an accusation. 'Every Tub' is the band's most storming 'head', yet even with the excitement of the open trumpet and Basie's logical single-note line there are subtleties, such as the slight change of reed figure between second and third ensemble choruses. What a band it was!"

This suggests something that was also there in the music – a mixture of precise, almost mathematic calculation ("the slight change of reed figure between second and third ensemble choruses"), and a simultaneous sense of the music evoking things that were almost beyond explanation. For what it's worth, given that Basie spent this period of his career based in New York, the band's music is suggestive to me of a rapid, filmic journey past different urban scenes – whether intentionally or not, something evoked by ever-shifting passages, dominated in turn by each member of the band. Moreover, on "Sent For You Yesterday", you hear an underrated sound: saxes played in perfect unison, which somehow conjure up the cool glide of cars, moving uptown. Meanwhile, trumpet swells sound like blaring sirens, and the drums hiss and clatter like overhead trains. If ever music blurred seamlessly out into its surrounding environment, this was it.

In turn, pieces by Basie and Duke Ellington sent me back to one of the few pieces of pre-'45 music that had broken through my teenage closed-mindedness – not on Larkin's Jazz, although it could easily have been included. I first heard Ellington's "Take the 'A' Train" – written by Billy Strayhorn in 1938, and first recorded by the Ellington orchestra in 1941 – on an awful 1980s Rolling Stones live album, on which it was used as the band's walk-up music. I have returned to it ever since. On the best versions, there is no messing about: without any preamble, the saxes begin humming the riff that seems to capture all of urban America's high-rise excitement, with trumpets bursting through like bright lights, before the arrangement speeds into passages so varied as to make three or four minutes seem twice as long. It is a work of amazing complexity, which manages to convey a simple kind of joy.

In short, everything in this music goes right, for ever; and one imagines Larkin tuning in – in Oxford, or Wellington or Coventry – with fusty old England closing in, but sounds from the New World exhorting him to muddle through. Power and glory, indeed.

John Harris's book The Beat of Happiness: Music Writing Inspired by Philip Larkin is funded by Arts Council England and commissioned by Hull City Council and Larkin25. Available from Hull City Arts for £3.95 p&p; enquiries to cityartsenquiries@hullcc.gov.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/may/21/jazz-philip-larkin-john-harris?INTCMP=SRCH

In Bob We Trust

Dylan at 70: In Bob we trust
The general consensus is that Bob Dylan reached his peak in 1975, and it's been a slow, frustrating decline ever since. But there are gems to be found even in his most-maligned releases

Stephen Moss
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 19 May 2011 22.00

Bob Dylan is 70 on Tuesday. If like me you are a Dylan fan, you will have been waiting for this event for months, perhaps even years. If you are not a Dylan fan – and I realise there are some who have not seen the light – you'll wonder what all the fuss is about. Even those happy to hum along to his early hits may now think his life is but a joke.

I am a Dylan fan, but not quite a fanatic. I'm not one of those people who goes to every gig, collates setlists, chats with other obsessives on internet messageboards, or criss-crosses America in an RV in pursuit of him. I first saw him in 1978, when he played a week of concerts at Earls Court. He hadn't performed in the UK for nine years, and these were huge events. For me, just finishing university, this wasn't a show, it was a rite of passage, a communion, a consummation. I have kept my programme and even my ticket from that 1978 concert. I've just discovered that ticket stubs from those concerts are selling online for £20 – three times what I paid for my balcony seat back then – but I'm not selling. For me, this concert was a watershed. I had found someone in whom I believed totally.

What's odd is that I've never questioned that faith, even when his inspiration flagged. As a recent poll of leading musicians in Rolling Stone magazine suggests, all his signature songs are from the first 15 years of his career. Blood on the Tracks in 1975 marks the end of that period of unquestioned greatness. Desire – the first album I got to know well thanks to John Peel playing it complete on his late-night Radio 1 show as soon as it was released in 1976 – retains some of that aura and ambition. But Street Legal, released in 1978, shows a marked falling off. Music writer and Dylan specialist Greil Marcus immediately recognised its inauthenticity. The banal, mechanical rhyming underlines the diminishing energy, and not even the brilliant Señor can save it. Dylan's muddled middle period was beginning.

It is tempting to conjure up a brilliantly revisionist argument – that the true glory of Dylan resides in the mid-80s albums Empire Burlesque and Knocked Out Loaded, for instance – but it can't be done. But the albums in the middle period should not be completely dismissed, even though many critics more or less gave up on him in the 80s. Some artists who produced great work in the 60s and early 70s – Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones spring to mind – really have added nothing of note to their oeuvre since. They remind you of those young playwrights who pile out great plays before realising just how difficult it is. Once they've lost that innocence, they either dry up, or, worse, spend 40 years repeating themselves.

Dylan had lost the knack of producing great albums – he was blocked creatively for much of the 80s – but could still knock out the occasional great song. Shot of Love, released in 1981 at the height of his religious phase, ends with the poignant Every Grain of Sand. Infidels, from 1983, has Jokerman. Even Down in the Groove in 1988, reckoned by some to be his worst album, a bare 30 minutes of insipid new songs and uninspired covers, has one song I really like – Death Is Not the End, which has one of those gloriously mournful Dylan harmonica intros. This is enough to forgive him a great deal, even the peculiar version of Shenandoah on the same disc.

Something was clearly amiss in the 80s – mid-life crisis, too much touring, personal problems, who knows? His gift was always instinctive rather than entirely controlled. No one who could publish Tarantula, his rambling 1966 sub-Ginsbergian poem, or waste his time on the tedious and incomprehensible mid-70s film Renaldo and Clara could claim to have impeccable artistic judgment. When it was easy for him, it was too easy; when it got hard, maybe he panicked.

You certainly sense a degree of panic in his memoir Chronicles, published to great acclaim in 2004. "I hadn't actually disappeared from the scene," he writes, "but the road had narrowed … I was lingering out on the pavement. There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him … I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck. Too much static in my head and I couldn't dump the stuff. Wherever I am, I'm a 60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows. I'm in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion." This is laying it on a bit thick. Dylan, for all his virtues, never quite knows when to stop when it comes to word production.

Dylan's audience diminished in the 80s. It was easy to get tickets for gigs, and you could see him in smaller venues. But we true fans never wavered. I would have bought the albums even if they hadn't still contained the occasional gem. I'd signed up for the religion at Earls Court in 1978, and there was no going back.

He wasn't confined to small venues for long. The official bootlegs won back the critics, and gave fans like me new cause for fascination. Then came the run of albums, beginning with Time Out of Mind in 1997, that suggested his gifts had returned, albeit in different form. He seemed to have found his voice again as he ruminated on mortality and communed with the ghosts of the great bluesmen.

Late Dylan is fascinating: the darkness, the obsession with time draining away, the refusal to stop touring even with a voice as rough as sandpaper. He transcends criticism now. When he makes a Christmas album, as he did in 2009, we nod sagely and add it to our collections, marking it down as an homage to Bing Crosby, one of his earliest heroes. I could probably live without it, but I'm not embarrassed to have it in my collection. Indeed, his croaky rendition of O Come All Ye Faithful (with verses in Latin and what may be English) may turn into a regular part of my Christmas ritual, like eating too many cheese footballs before dinner.

I bought an album recently to fill a gap in my collection: Bob Dylan (A Fool Such As I). It was released in 1973 by Columbia when Dylan announced he was moving to Asylum. Generally seen as a malign attempt at subversion from his long-time label, it is filled with covers he had recorded but never intended to release – Can't Help Falling in Love, Big Yellow Taxi, A Fool Such As I, Mr Bojangles. Critics mocked it, and it was quickly deleted when Dylan made his way back to Columbia. It's expensive to buy – the CD cost £55 from a seller in Germany. I'm listening to it now. And do you know what? It's great, money well spent; the sabotage didn't work.

Dylan has been omnipresent for the past 50 years, yet we know next to nothing about him. Fat books pour forth, especially in this anniversary year, yet he still eludes us, this rolling stone, this balladic thin man. Todd Haynes's clever, beautiful, moving film, I'm Not There, is a perfect summation of Dylan's career, because he truly does not seem to have been there during those 50 years. The six Dylan personas incarnated by six different actors (including a black boy and a white woman) perfectly represent Dylan's elusiveness, his partly deliberate evasiveness, his stolid evanescence (the lyrical logorrhoea is catching).

I have a framed photograph of the young Dylan on the wall next to my desk. He is thin, wearing jeans and a check shirt, looking straight at the camera with a hint of arrogance, hands in pockets, his guitar case sitting on the road beside him. He is standing outside, in what looks like an empty car park, surrounded by pools of water. He is alone, self contained, at one with himself in this alien landscape. He has a slight smile, as if he has some secret information. Yet he never spells it out, never makes it easy for us. That may be why the love affair endures; the mystery remains. The answer is still blowin' in the wind.

In 2005, the Guardian asked me to review a Dylan gig. This was probably a mistake as the chance of an objective assessment was nil. The reviews editor may have realised this when I tried to give the show seven stars. I remember becoming tearful during Visions of Johanna, one of his truly great songs, which even the ultra-reductive late Dylan is incapable of reducing to rubble. A man standing beside me saw me making notes through the tears. "We're just crossing the ocean with Bob," he said. "Write that down." And I did, because he had summed up what it means to be a Dylan fan. We are on a voyage, and the voyage never ends.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/may/19/bob-dylan-at-70

Van Dyke Parks in London

Van Dyke Parks, Union Chapel, London
By Ludovik Hunter-Tilney

May 17 2011 18:50

Van Dyke Parks is best known for a work that didn’t see the light of day for 37 years. Brian Wilson recruited him as lyricist for Smile, the Beach Boys’ ambitious follow-up to Pet Sounds, which Wilson abandoned in 1967 as his mental health deteriorated. It wasn’t until 2004 that the album finally appeared, thus giving form to the most famous, but mysterious, entry in Parks’s discography.

The venue for this one-off concert wasn’t full. In spite of releasing a highly regarded series of solo albums, Parks’s profile has been more behind the scenes than front of the house, working as a composer, arranger, session musician and producer with acts from The Byrds to Joanna Newsom. So it marks a quixotic new development that he has decided at 68 to become a touring musician.

Last year he went on his first US tour, backed by the Brooklyn chamber-pop band Clare and the Reasons, who appeared at the Union Chapel too. The white-haired, moustached, avuncular Parks sat at a grand piano, accompanied by a violinist, cello player and bassist. His piano-playing fluently mixed rococo flurries of chords, light and ironic in touch, with declamatory passages when his hands pounded down on the keys. Twisty verses and resonant choruses placed him somewhere between the show-tune pizzazz of Cole Porter and the satirical singer-songwriterisms of Randy Newman, a late-1960s Californian compadre whose first albums Parks produced.

He opened with the title track from his 1984 album Jump!, hyperactive piano leading a merry jaunt into Broadway-style Americana. “Opportunity for Two”, from the same album, was sunny romantic pop, “Orange Crate Art”, a 1995 collaboration with Wilson, struck a Wilsonish balance between joy and melancholy. Clare Manchon of Clare and the Reasons joined him to duet on Smile’s “Heroes and Villains”.

It was a charming show, with asides full of quips (“There are only three types of people in the world. Those who can count and those who can’t”). But the gothic church setting was incongruous, and the songs, shorn of full instrumentation, felt diminished. Someone, get that man an orchestra.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/be6dd790-80a9-11e0-85a4-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1MdLXtNsx

Edward Hardwicke RIP

Edward Hardwicke
Edward Hardwicke, who died on Monday aged 78, was best known on television for playing Dr Watson in a Sherlock Holmes series in the 1980s, but had already come to public attention in the 1970s series Colditz as the character based on the real-life war hero Pat Reid.

Hardwicke had been suggested as the bumbling foil to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's inscrutable sleuth by the actor David Burke, who had portrayed Watson in the Granada Television's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984-85), alongside Jeremy Brett, the 117th actor to take the title role.

When Holmes was resurrected from the dead after plunging from the Reichenbach Falls and the series was revived, in 1986, as The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Hardwicke played Watson in 11 hour-long episodes.

As the calm and attentive companion to the moody sage of Baker Street, Hardwicke retained the role for two-hour versions of The Sign Of Four and The Hound Of The Baskervilles (1988) as well as in subsequent adventures broadcast as The Casebook Of Sherlock Holmes (1991) and the valedictory The Memoirs Of Sherlock Holmes (1994).

"The superbly handsome Jeremy Brett, the regularity of his features made dramatic by a broken nose, the mellifluousness of his voice made arresting by a slight vocal impediment, presented a ravaged and romantic Holmes ... [whose] relationship with Edward Hardwicke's transparently decent Watson was that of a drowning man clinging to a raft," declared the actor Simon Callow.

As Captain Pat Grant in Colditz, Hardwicke based his character on Major Pat Reid, the real-life escape officer in the supposedly escape-proof German prison perched on a 250ft-high cliff. The first series, shown in 1972, and the follow-up two years later were based on Reid's books about his exploits at Colditz and the efforts of the Allied prisoners to escape.

Edward Cedric Hardwicke was born on August 7 1932 in London, the son of the actors Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Helena Pickard. His film career in Hollywood began when he was only 10, in Victor Fleming's film A Guy Named Joe (1943), with Spencer Tracy. Returning to England, he was educated at Stowe, and did his National Service as a pilot officer in the RAF. He then went to Rada.

He appeared at the Bristol Old Vic, the Oxford Playhouse and the Nottingham Playhouse before joining Laurence Olivier's National Theatre in 1964, performing there regularly for seven years. He appeared with Olivier in Othello and The Master Builder.

Among many other roles, Hardwicke also appeared in Charley's Aunt; Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; Congreve's The Way of the World; and with Robert Stephens in Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun. He returned to the National in 1977 for a production of Feydeau's The Lady From Maxim's.

In 2001 he played Arthur Winslow in The Winslow Boy at the Chichester Festival Theatre, reprising a role taken by his father in the 1948 film.

Hardwicke's other television credits included My Old Man, Holocaust (1978); Oppenheimer (1980); Lovejoy (1992); The Ruth Rendell Mysteries (1997); David Copperfield (2000); Agatha Christie's Poirot (2004); and Fanny Hill (2007). In 1978 he appeared in the last episode of The Sweeney.

He also had parts in numerous films, among them The Day of the Jackal (1973); The Black Windmill (1974); Richard Loncraine's 1995 version of Richard III; The Scarlet Letter (1995); Shadowlands (1993); Elizabeth (1998); Enigma (2001); The Gathering Storm (2002); and the romantic comedy Love Actually (2003)

Edward Hardwicke was twice married. He was divorced from his first wife, Anne Iddon, who died in 2000, and is survived by his second wife, Prim Cotton, as well as by the two daughters of his first marriage.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/tv-radio-obituaries/8519646/Edward-Hardwicke.html

Tonight's set list

At the Big Jug, Durham: -

On The Way Home
After The Goldrush
Long May You Run
The Needle & The Damage Done

100% Neil for a change!

Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne)

Last night's set list

At The Habit, York: -

Love Song
Is It Only The Moonlight?
The Needle & The Damage Done
Don't Be Denied
Things We Said Today
Mind Your Own Business

Only planned for 4 songs so had to improvise at the end.

Photo by T. Toole esq

Greil Marcus on Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010 by Greil Marcus – review
Greil Marcus's collection of pieces on Dylan is both poetic and testy

Mark Ford
The Guardian
Saturday 14 May 2011

What is this shit?" opened Greil Marcus's Rolling Stone review of Bob Dylan's 1970 double album Self Portrait. According to Dylan, the depths of whose perversity can seem, on occasion, nigh on unfathomable, he decided to put together this eccentric melange of covers and odds and ends, including the worst numbers from his Isle of Wight concert of the previous summer, as a means of escaping the straitjacket of his fans' expectations. "We released that album to get people off my back," he later explained in an interview, "so people at that time would just stop buying my records, and they did."

Dylan was approaching 30 when Self Portrait appeared. Despite the country-pie persona he had assumed on the album's predecessor, Nashville Skyline, and despite his extended sabbatical from touring and his retreat from the public sphere after his motorbike accident in 1966, Dylan was still routinely being hailed as the "spokesman of his generation", as the "expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of young America", to quote from the address delivered at Princeton when the university conferred on him an honorary doctorate in the summer of that year. Dylan, however, simply wanted out. "What did I owe the rest of the world?" he asks, recalling this period in his memoir, Chronicles: "Nothing. Not a damned thing."

Its trenchant opening notwithstanding, Marcus's review of Self Portrait was in fact exhaustive, finely nuanced, and not entirely negative. He interprets the record as a weird sort of concept album, one gleaned from the cutting-room floor and artfully constructed as a "cover up, not as a revelation". Certain songs, such as "Living the Blues" and "Copper Kettle", get an unambiguous thumbs up, while others, such as Dylan's parodic version of Paul Simon's "The Boxer" (thought by some to be about Dylan), get smartly dismissed: "Jesus is it awful."

That's a phrase that must have coursed through the mind of even the most ardent of Dylan fans on more than one occasion over the four decades that have passed since Self Portrait. Dylan is now approaching his 70th birthday, and the uneven, often baffling trajectory of his career, with all its astonishing peaks and dispiriting troughs, is at last developing a degree of clarity. For every great "comeback" album such as Blood on the Tracks or Infidels there has been a Down in the Groove or a Christmas in the Heart, for every sublime reconnection with his genius, a shambolic shuffle down a blind alley.

In recent years both trade and academic presses have been rolling out book after book on the man who transformed popular music for ever. That transformation took place primarily in the years 1965-66, when Dylan released his great trilogy of albums, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, and embarked on a world tour with the Band that is often called the greatest rock'n'roll tour of all time. It reached its apotheosis in the famous concert on 17 May at Manchester Free Trade Hall, at which Dylan responded to a cry of "Judas" from a disaffected folkie with an instruction to the band to "play fucking loud", and an incendiary performance of "Like a Rolling Stone". Footage of this concert provides the climax to Martin Scorsese's superb documentary of Dylan's early career, No Direction Home, although we get to see only the first verse of the song: no doubt the rest is stored in the vaults awaiting some further lucrative release.

Marcus, who is four years Dylan's junior, was just old enough to see the pre-electric, folk-singing and "finger-pointin'" Dylan in action. This book opens with Marcus's memories of a scruffy young singer-songwriter appearing as a guest act at a Joan Baez concert held in a field in New Jersey in the summer of 1963. The 18-year-old Marcus was mesmerised by Dylan's stage persona, and he records the occasion as if it were a coup de foudre: "Something in his demeanour dared you to pin him down, to sum him up and write him off, and you couldn't do it." Spotting the singer, whose name he hadn't caught, fumbling to light a cigarette after the show, Marcus approached him and told him how much he'd enjoyed his set. "I was shit," Dylan replied, "I was just shit."

So began an on-again/off-again romance fully charted in this compendious collection of Marcus's occasional writings on his hero. The first piece is from 1968, three years after Marcus witnessed one of the legendary Dylan and Band concerts – "a show that without any question was the most powerful performance I've ever seen by anyone." This piece also describes a less powerful gig at which a Bob Dylan imitator performs a Dylanesque harmonica solo while hidden from the audience inside a trunk. Could it possibly, possibly be him, the audience wonders? About a year earlier Dylan had composed and sung in the course of The Basement Tapes sessions – about which Marcus wrote brilliantly in an earlier book on Dylan called Invisible Republic – the perfect response to all the unrequited longing that had built up during "three years of memories, of waiting, scares of the end and false starts toward another chance": "I'm not there."

As in Invisible Republic, Marcus often uses Dylan songs or performances as an entry into extended riffs on the history of American music. He also enjoys testing the power of early Dylan songs such as "With God on Our Side" to serve as responses to recent events, such as the invasion of Iraq.

Marcus has surprisingly little time, however, for the "Rolling Thunder" tour of 1975, and positively foams at the mouth when attempting to appraise Dylan's evangelical Christian phase (1979-82), although it was during this period Dylan produced some of his greatest concert performances, and wrote many wonderful songs. He savages Street Legal, dismisses Oh Mercy as "airless", and rather overrates, in my opinion, the patchwork quilt of quotations that is Love and Theft.

But then this volume is itself a kind of patchwork quilt, by turns poetic and contentious, at times testy as a spurned lover, but worth reading for the occasions when Dylan at last lives up to Marcus's notions of what Dylan should be, and the writing swoons and soars in its dizzying efforts to make us feel what Dylan's music is doing to him, and the "love minus zero / no limit" it can inspire.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/may/15/bob-dylan-writings-marcus-review?INTCMP=SRCH

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #107

The early days of the FNB #1

Entry requirements were more rigorous. These days we don't need no stinking badges.

Brian Wilson in GQ

GQ&A: Brian Wilson
By Andy Morris

Interviewing a former Beach Boy in an airless function room of a Mayfair hotel is an unsettling experience - the 68-year-old composer of "pocket symphonies" speaks in short, childlike sentences in delicate Californian tones. In a way, it's troubling to see him so fragile; in another, given that he's survived much-documented mental illness and drug excesses, it's an honour and a privilege to see him at all. In town to play Jools Holland and promote his "Brian Wilson Re-imagines Gershwin" tour, here Wilson talks about meeting his hero Paul McCartney, the return of the Hawaiian shirt and throwing a punch at Elvis.

GQ.com: What do you still get out of touring?
Brian Wilson: The satisfaction of knowing that people like what we do on stage. If they like us, that makes us want to play better. If they're a stupid audience that doesn't know what's going on, we just grind it out and keep playing.

Having worshipped the Beatles and tried to emulate Rubber Soul with Pet Sounds, what was it like when you finally met Paul McCartney?
I met him in a recording studio in Los Angeles. He was with Derek Taylor, the Beatles' publicist. He came by and he played his song "She's Leaving Home" on a piano for me and my wife. My wife started crying and he told me, "We haven't [even] recorded this yet." So we got to hear it before [Sgt Pepper]? Oh my God yes.

The critics originally dismissed Pet Sounds. Do you still care what they think?
Yeah, I care but I don't take it very seriously. After That Lucky Old Sun and Smile, Pet Sounds is just another piece of confetti, you know?

What did working with lyricist Van Dyke Parks give you?
Lyrics that have poetical images that you can conjure up.

You met your wife when she sold you a car. Has she given you any tips on buying one?
She just bought me one for Christmas! She bought a black Mercedes-Benz. Great car! We own four: I have a Mercedes, she has a Mercedes, we have a big van and we have a Cadillac Escalade.

When you were 16, you used to capture sounds on a Wollensak tape recorder. What were they?
The wind. Rain drops. Coyote howls. A whole library of sound effects.

The Hawaiian shirt is back in fashion for spring/summer 2011. What are your thoughts?
I bought my first [real] one in 1985 in Honolulu. I went to the stores and they had all kinds of floral shirts. I bought twelve of them. Why are they so good? Because they're colourful and bring Hawaii to America. To wear a floral shirt is an experience.

You wrote "The Warmth of the Sun" following the death of JFK. Does modern politics ever inspire you?
Politics goes in one ear and out the other. I don't even know the president's name for sure. [laughs] That's how stupid I am.

Is there anyone left you'd like to work with?
Elton John, Eric Clapton and Paul have worked with me. I'm not really sure who I want to work with. I really don't know.

You once said you'd like to play for the Yankees. Do you think baseball's loss is music's gain?
I would have been a professional player, but I got sidetracked by the music business. [laughs] Sure, I would have been a good player, yeah.

You told GQ that Madonna was the sexiest woman in pop. Do you think that Lady Gaga is now the sexiest?
Yes I do! Do I like her music? I'm not a fan, but I've seen her.

What's the best advice you've ever been given?
My dad told me, "When you're going to write a song, follow through with it until it's done. Don't go halfway and then piss out on it." This is what I tell people when I'm asked what advice would I give young aspiring songwriters. Finish your project and don't throw it away.

What do you watch on TV?
There's a TV station called Sixties Revolution, that plays back-to-back Sixties music 24 hours a day. I just absolutely love that channel, I really do.

What's the most important item on your rider?
Chocolate-chip cookies and water.

Are you still as driven as you used to be?
Not quite, but I'm still ambitious.

You have twelve dogs in your house. How should GQ readers choose a good pet?
Get a little dog because they're cuter. I love my black poodle Lulu. We got her from the pet shop from down the street.

Who is the toughest guy you know?
My buddy Jeff [points to Jeffrey Foskett, Wilson's Musical Director]. He's tough inside, a go-getter.

What should everyone bring to a festival?
A hankerchief - because you cry!

What should every man know about women?
Don't get married until you're certain that you're marrying the right girl. How did I know my wife was the one? I'd seen her for a couple of months. I liked her. She was a very creative person and she had a very good grip on politics and business.

What skill should every man possess?
To play the piano.

When was the last time you threw a punch?
1976. At Elvis! He knew karate, right, so as soon as I raised my hand he [chopped] it out of my way. It was in a recording studio in Los Angeles. He had a really long burgundy cape on and kept calling everyone "Duke".

You've been teetotal for years but what do you remember being a good hangover cure?
What in the world is a hangover cure? [Jeff explains] Just [more] beer.

What advice would you give your younger self?
Not to take too many of those drugs. Those mind-bending drugs are just so difficult to come off...

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2BeQug/www.gq-magazine.co.uk/entertainment/articles/2011-05/11/gq-music-brian-wilson-interview-for-uk-tour

Tonight's set lists

At the Duke of Wellington, Newcastle: -

Things We Said Today
Tennessee Waltz
Blackbird

Mind Your Own Business
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Sugar Mountain

Falling

A fun night!

Tom Lovell

Yuri Gagarin - first manned space flight

Missed this one: the first manned space-flight, 50 years ago on April 10. Take it away, Paddy:

Pass the sick bag, Alice...

Shenanigans at The Habit

Last night's set list

At The Habit, York: -

Is It Only The Moonlight?
So Close
How Can We Say Goodbye? (debut performance)
Falling
Helpless

That's 2 Scoundrels songs on one night - a first I think.

A guy played Irish bagpipes - tremendous stuff. There is video footage available, courtesy of Mr Tom Toole, which may find its way onto this blog.

In Memory of Barry MacSweeney by Terry Kelly

Geordie Bigfoot shape-shifter
moving like a cipher
at the edge of Chopwell Woods
lurking below the tidal mark
between Lemington Glass Works
and the single lane road bridge at Newburn
the strange wind on your face

displaced from Bluff Creek
northern Californian woods
October 1967
his smudged after-image snapped
in a 16mm frame
he roams the blurry margins
of rumour and vague sightings

like a fool in a monkey suit
or the Memphis Flash zipping
from Shreveport to Texarkana
to rip up the Municipal Auditorium
November 24, 1954
burning up his first pink Cadillac
between Hope and Sweetwater

Geordie Bigfoot the Hillybilly Cat
came to me in a dream
not as a hot stink of fox
printing the midnight page
but as high-pitched abandon
swaggering like Jimmy Cagney
in Yankee Doodle Dandy

roaming through dead Tyneside pits
up on his hind legs just like a man
Geordie Bigfoot Memphis Flash
shape-shifting cipher ghosting
through the forgotten places
holding in his blackened paws
the last piece of coal in England

Terry Kelly

Loudon Wainwright at the Sage, Gateshead - review by Terry Kelly

Loudon and daughter, Lucy Wainwright-Roche, who supported him at the Sage

JOKES about the lately deceased Osama bin Laden are not the norm for concerts at The Sage.

But very little seems out of bounds for US singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III.

A bard of familial tensions, death, sex and other fairly important topics, Wainwright punctures the serious stuff with a wicked and finely honed sense of humour.

Opening with Westchester County - one of several hymns to his well-heeled childhood - Wainwright took his Tyneside audience on a musical journey which began with his first album, way back in 1970.

Many of the songs featured live are collected in a handsome new box set, called 40 Odd Years, which Wainwright happily signed after the gig.

Although famous for his dark subject matter, Wainwright is careful to lighten the mood with songs like I'm Alright (which he calls his "happy blues"), and Heaven, about an endless party in the afterlife.

But Wainwright can switch to seriousness in an instant, treating the audience to the haunting Dead Man, an elegy about trying on his late father's clothes.

Now in his mid-60s, the ageing process is continuing to feed Wainwright's muse (My Meds), but Wainwright somehow leaves his fans smiling at the Grim Reaper.

Ably supported on several numbers by his daughter, Lucy Wainwright Roche, one of America's greatest exports served up his only real chart hit, Dead Skunk, before raising the roof with a rousing encore of The Swimming Song.

Terry Kelly

John Walker RIP

John Walker
John Walker, who died on May 7 aged 67, founded The Walker Brothers, the American trio which came to Britain in the 1960s and briefly rivalled in popularity The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

6:25PM BST 09 May 2011

The Walker Brothers specialised in heavily-produced, booming, often lachrymose ballads which — along with their good looks — found particular favour with teenage girls. The group consisted of John Walker on guitar, Scott Engel on bass and Gary Leeds on drums; they were not related, and each adopted the surname Walker.

Their hits included The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore; Love Her; Make it Easy On Yourself; and My Ship Is Comin’ In. John Walker and Scott Engel provided the vocals, although the latter was always regarded as the more charismatic. John himself admitted: “I haven’t got the same kind of depth to my voice that Scott has, but I do have a good voice for the up-tempo discs. ”

John Walker was born John Joseph Maus on November 12 1943 in New York, but the family moved to California when he was three. He began as a child actor, appearing alongside Betty Hutton in the television sitcom Hello Mom, but in 1957 formed a duo, John and Judy, with his sister. They later met Scott Engel, and, with “Spider” Webb on drums, performed as Judy and the Gents.

John began using the professional name Walker when he was 17 . By late 1964 he, Engel and Gary Leeds had formed The Walker Brothers in Los Angeles — and it was Leeds, who had toured Britain with PJ Proby, who is said to have suggested that they try their luck on the other side of the Atlantic. It was an era when the ambition of most British bands was to crack the American market.

“Gary said we could do really well there,” Scott recalled later. “I wanted to get out of America anyway and go to Europe because I’d always been a European film freak. I wanted to see if I could meet Ingmar Bergman and a few other people. So the three of us came over and started going slowly broke. Nothing was happening and we were freezing to death. Straight from California to this in February 1965.”

In June that year, however, the group had its first big success, reaching the Top 20 with Love Her. They appeared on the television show Thank Your Lucky Stars, on which they were mobbed by female fans, and their next single, Burt Bacharach’s and Hal David’s Make It Easy On Yourself, went straight to No 1 that August. At Christmas the group was at No 3 with My Ship Is Coming In, and in March 1966 they scored their second No 1 with The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore.

This proved to be the height of The Walkers’ popularity. Relations between John and Scott were becoming strained, and in April 1967 they played what turned out to be their last British gig, at the Granada in Tooting. Scott announced that he was leaving the group, John Walker remarking: “If Scott quits then that’s it as far as I’m concerned – he is the Walker Brothers.”

John Walker came up with a solo hit, Annabella, and a couple of albums, If You Go Away and This Is John Walker; Scott embarked on his own successful solo career.

In 1975 The Walker Brothers re-formed and attempted a comeback, and a single — a version of Tom Rush’s No Regrets — made the UK’s Top 10. But three albums later, in the late 1970s, they again went their separate ways.

In the late 1980s John Walker moved to San Diego, where he established his own recording studio. He also formed his own publishing company and record label. He remained popular in Britain, where he toured as part of a Silver 60s show until his health declined. Last December he was diagnosed with liver cancer, but he continued to work until only a few weeks ago, making his last concert appearance in Los Angeles in March.

In 2009, with Gary Leeds, he published a book, The Walker Brothers: No Regrets — Our Story.

John Walker was four times married, and is survived by his fourth wife, Cynthia, and by two sons and two daughters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/8503377/John-Walker.html

John Maus RIP

John was a good guy and very talented. He'd seen it all, although I hate to see him go. For any of you who don't know much, here's some info about John.

He was Born John Maus 11/12/43 in NYC, he died 5/7/11 in Glendale, Ca (Liver cancer)

John's family moved to California in 1947 and he was a child actor in TV and film. He appeared in the TV shows Peck's Bad Girl, Playhouse 90, Eddie Fisher Xmas Special, Hey Mom, and in the films The Eddie Duchin Story (1956) and Missouri Traveller (1958).

In 1958 he formed the singing duo "John and Judy" with his older sister Judy Maus. "John and Judy" signed to Dore Records and had a So. Cal radio hit with the song "Hideout". They also recorded for the Arve and Admiral labels. John befriended and performed locally with Richie Valens in 1958. He became the first guitar teacher for Beach Boys Carl Wilson and David Marks in 1959. John partnered with singer/bassist Scott Engel in 1962. They changed their name to The Walker Brothers in 1964 and became a top draw at Gazzari's nightclub on Sunset Blvd. The Walker Brothers were regulars on TV's Shindig! in 1964/65 and were signed to Mercury Records in late 1964 by Nik Venet. John and Scott joined with drummer Gary Leeds of the Standells, who became the third Walker Brother in 1965. The trio moved to the U.K. Feb 1965. John also married popular singer Kathy Young in 1965.

The Walker Brothers released their classic hits "Make It Easy On Yourself" and "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore", both reaching #1 in the U.K. in 1965 and 1966. After two years of massive success they broke up following a 1968 tour of Japan. John Walker released solo material for Phillips Records in 1968 and a 1969 solo LP on the Carnaby label in 1969. He recorded an unreleased solo LP with Rolling Stones' Bill Wyman producing, recorded in France in spring 1971 with appearances by Keith Richards, Bobby Keys, Jim Price and Nicky Hopkins. The Walker Brothers reunited in 1974 with their hit record "No Regrets". In the 1980's John performed in the Monster Rock and Roll Show oldies UK tour with Screaming Lord Sutch, Dave Dee and others. In the 2000's John performed regularly in the UK as a popular oldies act backed by The Dakotas.

We've lost a very important connection to the earliest days of the Beach Boys, and one of the major stars of sixties pop/rock. John's harmony voice and his cool guitar licks made an impact. I'm gonna miss him.

-Jon Stebbins (author of Dennis Wilson: The Real Beach Boy and The Lost Beach Boy: The True Story of David Marks, One of the Founding Members of the Beach Boys)

http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php/topic,10312.0.html

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #106